commendation for outstanding service to human race: resident advisor

the new nathan fake album is surprisingly good - "degreelessness" is a huge standout

I just chanced it and it sounded like something the hey qt people would do on their day off

wow rude

I know! I wasn't going to say anything, but I played it and there it was, unmistakable!

The video didn't help either, it looked like if you took the person or people out of the hey qt video.

Degreelessness is the only one so far with any sense of space or dynamics. The rest is just standard M83 type shit and basically the reason I avoid Nathan Fake albums.

I feel like there are some parallels there but only if you're comparing to old M83 and not post-whenever M83 where the project turned into electronica retro Coldplay

the young marco podcast is fantastic.

aye

The Willow one from a few weeks ago is a keeper.

Flørist one is nice

blimey .. not heard that crustation album in years ...

Extremely good editorial on the site:

https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/3105

In sum: polls are being stopped in favor of unranked scene-surveying features. Among their stated points for the decision: uncomfortableness with erasure of non-white dudes in their poll results.

good for the, they should stop with the pointless numerical ratings while they're at it

them

Yes, saw this earlier - definitely a good move on their part.

just coming here to post about this

smart move and agreed on the numerical ratings

also: this one is really heavy

https://www.residentadvisor.net/podcast-episode.aspx?id=599

Right decision to get rid of the polls, for many reasons!

I've noticed lately that the reviews - singles especially - skew towards names and acts I'm not already familiar with, and the ones I am it's usually because they're on labels that veer experimental. I mean obviously house/techno/etc bobbins naturally skews towards the anonymous and temporal already but it's wonderful that they're acknowledging that they want to use the power of taste-shaping to reframe the discussion. It's not like the predictable suspects like Dixon or Jackmaster or Bicep need their names out there in the RA poll to get people to come see them anyway either.

as someone who disagrees w almost all polls always, i dont get the anti-polls thing. our contributors were overwhelmingly white & male so we decided to disguise that by doing away w/ the evidence, more like

I like the stuff on scenes I'm interested in (Montevideo, Frankfurt, Seoul) and some of the longer form stuff is good (and i generally dont like words!)

I've zero interest in Dixon, Jackmaster or Bicep and the polls just seemed to be their own world made up of that. They just looked like the English national football team lineup, and probably played like them too. Or Everton, no, West Brom. bloody hell, west brom, no wonder they canned it!

They probably learned the lessons of the US election and brexit and decided to quit while they were reasonably ahead, Dixon loses his top spot and starting place against Bournemouth to Trump, what a way to go out

xp it's not just hiding it though, is it? i think you're being uncharitable deej. you could argue that they're not letting demographics set their editorial agenda. i'm personally not crazy about the steps they're taking in the direction of becoming a "high culture" site but at least they're taking a stand on it, right?

our contributors were overwhelmingly white & male so we decided to disguise that by doing away w/ the evidence, more like

yeah...

i guess id rather see them consider what a list that takes into account those concerns would look like rather than ceding authority to millions of interpersonal conversations

to me it feels like abandoning responsibility rather than taking it

also the site already does tonnes of 'unranked scene-surveying features'

I think it’s a reasonable experiment, might turn out just ok, might flatten the landscape a little

will it? or will it hurt the many smaller scale artists who would be boosted when seen among big-ticket artists who already have huge publicity machines behind them

seems to me that people haven't really thought through what happens to power structures when power is ostensibly abdicated

they’re still making lists, just not numbered afaik? like a roundup of works people liked, maybe I misread it

just no aggregating picks to create a top ten where an album one person loved doesn’t get equal billing because no one else was into that fringe movement. so that album is in there with everything else, no ranking

so Dixon might be in there but there’s nothing distinguishing his single from Elysia Crampton, each just gets a blurb

an unranked list is good

yeah, my understanding was they were just doing away with the numerical ranking specifically, maybe i’m wrong. i thought the point was that creating a hierarchy was harmful, not that curating a list was. they can’t escape curating anyway

I don’t really think the heirarchy is “harmful” lol

kinda agree this is about embarrassment towards their readership, maybe dislike. i guess it began as a prog/trance site and there's prob always been that element to the readership, somewhere along the line there have been various efforts to make it some sort of intellectualised (and maybe american) take on dance music without ever really losing some of the old readers. ra's identity struggles are just a microcosm of dance music's version of the same, the music is simultaneously cerebral and physical, intellectual and fun, ephemeral, hard to pin down. true of all music i suppose and a problem for all music writing but worse with dance music given its structural rules.

i mean i accept that the polls were leading to homogenised results but they were polls of the site's readers. essentially this is an admission that they don't like their readers or wish their readers were different in some way, i can't tell exactly what that difference is though because i'm not sure many people voting for their favourite dj or tune think "have i been fair and representative here" - they prob just think "i took an e at dixon and had a wonderful night"

if it's just an editorial decision that nobody needs to read the bullshit results of a huge internet-wide poll then by all means go for it but it's not like that makes for as good an editorial reason as saying you're doing it because your readers are bigots.

Among their stated points for the decision: uncomfortableness with erasure of non-white dudes in their poll results

also i don't think this take is borne out by the statement. for better or worse they don't mention race actually - there are certainly a lot of white men in the ra polls but it's not all white men. the statement seems to clearly suggest this is more about gender.

i think it's a kind of dangerous game to acknowledge, on your own site, "hey audience, your choices aren't diverse enough, both musically but more importantly when we asked you your favourite dj we expected your tastes to feature more women"

who exactly has failed here? or what exactly is failing?

even their internal polls were skewed male though. last years album list had only two female artists in the top 20

that's p much what i'm getting at.

they clearly stated that they thought the hierarchy reinforced through their lists was harmful because it reinforced certain power dynamics in the dance community xpost to D-40

agreed that they're admitting discomfort with their readership, but the response to the decision in the comments is overwhelmingly positive. which is weird b/c the last time i remember reading comments on RA a few years ago they were mostly terrible

yeah same, not familiar with the site at all these days really.

1) I've never heard of Dixon

2) deej that's just silly, there won't be a lack of headlining acts just because there no ranked poll

3) Ranked lists are the patriarchy

Dixon was #1 on their “best dj” polled list from 2013-2016

I’m pro ranked lists & anti the results, it’s the results that are patriarchal not the lists themselves

I don't know, not to over-generalize, but I think of an obsession with ranking and scoring things as an extremely male trait.

Btw I've only started reading RA in the last year or two, but I get a lot out of it. The comments however are hilarious/terrible, of course. And people seem bent on interpreting the review scores as objective across the site (as in "you really think record A is better than record B, that has a lower score?!"), when it seems pretty clear that it's usually situated within the context of an artist's previous work, or the maybe the genre they're working in.

I don't know, not to over-generalize, but I think of an obsession with ranking and scoring things as an extremely male trait.

flag on the play. essentialism. offense number 79. 15 yard penalty. automatic 1st down

1) I've never heard of Dixon

if only tim had done a poll

i'm fairly sure i don't like much of what dixon has been playing for the last 3/4 years, tho not paid much attention, most of that crew seem to have gravitated towards a sort of prog nouveau

equally i think it's good he became massively popular solely on the basis of djing with barely any production along the way - for a long time he was one of the best selectors and 100 times better than the producer-centric crap that passes for dance music or dj sets on this board.

don't read much on the site but pod + https://www.residentadvisor.net/tracks are essential

i didn't realize their eoy lists were crowdsourced/reader polls; surprisingly good if that's true. but re these concerns they should just switch to editorial list and hire more non-whitemale writers

otm